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Business Models: Napster to Go vs. iPod
CNet offers an interesting comparison between Napster to Go and iTunes.
For $15 a month, Napster to Go offers over 1 million songs (access to which lasts as long as subscription is valid), while songs for iPod must be purchased and last 'forever' (but it takes about $10,000 to fill an iPod). Is Napster to Go the future of digital music distribution? Would moving to an all-you-can-eat model hurt iPod business and balance the power among authors, studios, hardware makers and consumers?" It might take $10,000 to fill an iPod with songs downloaded from iTunes or with music converted to MP3 from newly purchased CDs, but there's a lot of downloadable and legit free music out there, not to mention Griffin's RadioShark.
It's worth mentioning that you can spend 99c / track at Napster too if you really like that model. So at Napster you have more choice. FWIW I think Napster is easier to use too.
Pretty much all of the methods to remove DRM include re-encoding the WMA to something else. This takes even more quality from the recording than is already missing in the Napster version (they are encoded at 128kbps). Furthermore, it is damnned near impossible to do a digital re-encode nowadays. Microsoft has revoked the WMA-DRM licence from all the media players that allowed it to happen, including all but the most recent version of Winamp that only allows encrypted WMA output through DirectSound. No more using DSP plugins to write the data to the disk in a different format. The best you can hope for is something like Tunebite, which records the analog signal coming from your soundcard, which is not very good at all.
But that 14 day FREE Trial only gives you 11 MB to download. It wasn't like that always, but once the news got around on Slashdot about how to rip the tracks, they shut it down.
You can still get old versions of winamp at oldversion.com The Update to 5.08 was the fix to WMA-DRM.
That was so last month. Napster enforced an 11mb-download limit for the 14-day trial after too much buzz spread about the winamp ripping device.
My digital rights don't need management.
Speaking of free good music ... I compiled a list of sites that host indie music, nearly all of which have completly free downloads. You can see it here. Worth checking out for anyone whose listening habits aren't limited to Top 40 Radio...
Who doesn't like free music?
*BUT* that's not all that important in this case. Important are the sources, the professional encoder used (or not) by the store and the care they took.
c't, Germany's most prestigious computer magazine, tested a number of different online stores recently and the quality differences between different stores, all using wma at the same bitrate, were staggering. It was also remarkable that Sony's Atrac, that's normally not considered to be an exceptionally good audio codec, offered some of the best quality. Apparently it's not the codec bitstream that's the problem in this case but the encoders offered, especially the software encoder in SonicStage seems to be optimized for speed and apparently doesn't really care about quality. Other example: mp3. If you compare the Fraunhofer reference encoder to the latest lame you're gonna think you listen to two different codecs. IOW codecs important, encoders even more important.
Moral of the story: AAC may be better when we look at the freely available encoders but that doesn't necessarily mean that the differences aren't a lot smaller if we look at music stores or that the codec has to be clearly better respectively.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Certificates are local files, pulled from Apple servers. If Apple were to go bankrupt, assuming they didn't issue a universal authenticator or provide a method for removing the DRM, there are already programs to allow one to transfer their certificates without a net connection. Of course, even failing that, there's always the option to burn the files to audio CD and re-rip them.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
This battle regarding purchasing second hand CDs was fought a few years back - and we won. It is very legal to purchase used CDs, and is how my collection has grown to over 500 disks. I mis-typed - thanks for clarifying the situation.
what people don't seem to realize is that napster to go is compatible with 3 players. They each hold 5 gb. So you can fill a 5gb player for $15/month. It seems rather unfair to compare this price to filling a 40gb ipod for good.
Depends on what you define as an artist. I've played in a band and arranged some music in the past. Was I at that time an artist? This is entertainment. By the nature of the business, a vast majority will not be making much money out of it.
Your points are confusing and angry. So you're saying that any artist who makes money from their CD sales is already so rich that they don't need this money?
Since you understand so much about the record business, why not provide us with examples of these artists and the figures you looked at so you could come to these conclusions.
For someone accusing others of having no understanding, you seem to have a child's view of the world.
-- Using the preview button since 2005